Oppose the Timber Executive Order – Write Your Reps!

In honor of National Day of Forests (March 21st), we’ve created this guide to help you write letters or make calls to your representatives to oppose the recent timber Executive Orders. Let’s flood congressional phone lines and inboxes and demand that they stand up for the people who elected them.

Understanding the Executive Order:

On March 1, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order entitled “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production.” The EO asserts that “heavy-handed Federal policies have prevented full utilization” of domestic timber resources, leading to reliance on foreign producers and compromising national and economic security.

To address these concerns, the order directs the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture to utilize tools such as the Good Neighbor Authority, stewardship contracting, and agreements with tribes under the Tribal Forest Protection Act to change timber harvesting practices on public lands. The EO lays out a timeline for the implementation of these policies:

Within 30 days, issue updated guidance to facilitate timber production, reduce delivery time, and decrease supply uncertainty, while also submitting legislative proposals to expand authorities.
Within 60 days, complete a strategy to accelerate forestry project approvals under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and explore streamlining consultation requirements.
Within 90 days, submit a plan to the President setting annual timber sale targets for the next four years.
Within 120 days, complete a programmatic consultation on Whitebark Pine under the ESA.
Within 180 days, consider adopting categorical exclusions to simplify environmental approvals for timber production and wildfire risk reduction.
Within 280 days, evaluate and potentially establish new categorical exclusions for timber thinning and salvage activities.

Key Talking Points from Bark

Bark has compiled critical points on how this affects our public lands. Here’s the full list: Bark Talking Points.

Here are our main points:

This EO will:

Increase clear-cutting and logging in sensitive areas, harming biodiversity and watershed health

Bypass key environmental laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA)

Disregard Indigenous sovereignty and sideline Tribal Nations from land management decisions

Exacerbate wildfire risks by prioritizing commercial logging over science-backed fire resilience strategies

If this EO stands unchallenged, its impacts will be immediate and far-reaching. Increasing timber production at the scale it proposes will magnify the threats our forests already face from ecologically destructive logging projects, increase the risk and severity of wildfire, poison our water supply, and enrich timber industry executives at the expense of our local economies and communities. This is the false promise of trickle-down timbernomics: corporate profits go up while everyone else pays the cost.

Make no mistake: this EO is not only a full-blown assault on our public lands. It is but one step in this administration’s broader mission to prop up corporate interests, privatize our public lands, concentrate power in the executive branch while limiting public oversight, and strip our communities and lands of the environmental protections guaranteed by law. 

Ensuring Worker Rehiring at Mount Hood National Forest (MHNF)

We also need to ensure probationary workers on MHNF are rehired as promised. Here’s the USDA’s press release on their rehiring.

USDA Worker Status Update

Contact Your Friends and Family in Other States

Do you have friends or family in other states that have Republican representatives? Their voices can make a real difference in getting key members of Congress to push back against this Executive Order.

Ask Them to Contact Their Federal Representatives

This isn’t about partisan politics—it’s about protecting public lands for future generations, supporting rural communities, and ensuring responsible, science-based forest management. Supporting conservation, outdoor recreation, and local control over land use are popular ideas to people on the other side of the aisle. Here are some talking points that could appeal to right-leaning representatives:

Conservation is a core American value. Strong leaders have fought for more than a century to protect and restore our forests for future generations. Congress must uphold this legacy.

Public lands belong to all Americans, not just corporations. This Executive Order prioritizes the profits of multinational corporations over access for hunters, hikers, and local communities who depend on these lands.

Rural economies depend on more than just logging. Outdoor recreation, hunting, and fishing bring billions of dollars into local economies. This EO will prioritize logging over these important industries. Destroying public lands for short-term profit undermines long-term economic stability.

Local voices should have a say. This Executive Order will reduce community involvement in decision-making processes, which puts corporate interests ahead of the communities and local economies that rely on these forests.

Crafting Your Message: Tools & Examples

Use the information above and the information in the Climate Forest Coalition’s toolkit below to craft a letter to send to your Representative! Here’s the Messaging Toolkit.

Make sure you send your letter to the right elected official. Not sure who you Representative is? Plug your address into this tool to find out: Who is My Representative?

Include catchy phrases in your letter, and be specific! Generic letters receive generic responses.

Here’s a template letter you and your friends and family can personalize:

_____________________________________________________________________________

[Catchy, Relevant Subject]

Dear [Senator/Rep. Last Name],

My name is [Name], and I am a resident of [City/Town, Oregon] who deeply values our public lands, especially [Your Favorite National Forest]. I am writing to urge you to [oppose/another synonym] President Trump’s March 1st Executive Order on Timber Production, which threatens to [short summary, 1 clause long].

This executive order [personalized summary, 1-2 short paragraphs].

For me, this is personal. [Insert a brief personal connection—how you use these forests, why they matter to you, and how increased logging would impact you or your community].

I urge you to:

[personalized call to action]

[personalized call to action]

[personalized call to action]

[Personalized Value statement, 1-2 sentences] e.g., Our forests belong to the American people, not private industry. Please stand with your constituents, not corporate interests.

Thank you for your hard work, and I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

[Name]

Here’s another template letter from the Climate Forest Coalition’s toolkit:

_____________________________________________________________________________

Petition to Members of Congress

Senator/Representative [Insert Name],

The Trump administration wants to turn our public forests into tree farms, growing trees that can be logged and sold. Increasing timber production means cutting down more big, old trees—the biggest trees will produce the most lumber. Once an old-growth tree is cut and sold, it will take longer than most human lifetimes to replace it.

Old-growth and mature trees and forests provide homes for wildlife, filter drinking water, provide recreational opportunities, and absorb and store carbon, helping us to fight climate change. Chopping them down means we lose these benefits, and it will take decades or centuries to regrow them—if they can be regrown at all. Since older trees absorb and store more carbon than their younger counterparts, it is especially important that we keep these forests standing right now while we have the most ability to mitigate climate change.

We urge you to push back against the direction set by President Trump’s March 1 Executive Orders on timber production.

Without mature and old-growth trees and forests, we lose the opportunity to hike among giant trees and to share the earth with the wildlife that live in their branches and among their roots. And as we face climate change, we need these allies who provide the air we breathe, suck carbon out of the atmosphere, and are resilient to wildfires. Our lives will be less rich, and our planet will be less livable without our oldest forests.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]